Jay hurried to the behavioral sciences building. He had developed a quirk during his second year in university where he liked to sit in the front row of all his classes. Unfortunately, it was a difficult thing to do in a class of nearly five hundred people—PSY101 had one of the largest student bodies due to it being required for so many students. That paired with the fact that he was already running late meant that the odds were definitely not in his favor. He picked up his pace.

Luckily, it wasn’t a far walk to the building. Everything on campus was compacted together to make travel easy for students. If he had to, Jay could get from the north side of campus to the south side in just under thirty minutes on foot. He stepped inside the building and turned left, heading down the hallway towards lecture hall number 107, where his class was being held. He could hear from outside the door that the professor had already started teaching. Hopefully he hadn’t missed anything important.

Jay cracked the door open and slipped inside. Too late to go to the front row now, even if there were seats available. He crept quietly into a middle section and sat down in an empty chair, popping open the side table to use for notetaking and retrieving a pen and notebook from out of his backpack.

The lesson that day was about obedience and roleplaying. The professor talked to the class about Milgram’s electric chair experiment—subjects were told by an authority figure to shock a person in an electric chair, increasing voltage until the other “died” (although the shocked person was really just an actor)—and the Stanford prison experiment—subjects roleplayed as prison wards and prisoners, and the wards ended up torturing the prisoners due to false expectations of themselves. Jay hung on his words, morbidly fascinated by how people could be so ruthless to each other, just because they felt like they were supposed to be. He wondered if he would have done the same thing, if he were in their shoes. He would have liked to think he was above such terrible acts, but according to the studies, anyone could fall victim to the two mentalities. He shuddered. It was a bit frightening.

At the end of the lecture, the professor announced that there would be a group project due at the end of the semester. The class was to be paired off in groups of two, and each pair was to analyze each other’s behavior. They were to choose one psychological trait to study and then report on at the end of the experiment. The trait didn’t have to be something covered in class. When the instructions were over, he let them spend the rest of the class finding a partner to work with. Jay looked around the room. There were plenty of people he recognized: friends from other classes, neighbors from his apartment, teammates from the cross country team, members of Greek life… But he didn’t want to partner with somebody he already knew. That would be bias, right?

Jay heard a giggle off to his left. He turned to see a group of girls smiling and glancing in his direction. One of them gave another girl a push towards him. Clearly, they were trying to get her to ask him to be her partner, but she was nervous. He considered going over to ask her, himself—she was pretty cute, after all—but stopped when he saw the insignia on the girls’ backpacks: ΧΩ. Chi Omega. Sorority girls. He grimaced and looked away, bad memories resurfacing. He knew it was unfair of him to judge all of them for how his exes had behaved, but he couldn’t help it. He was zero for three when it came to dating girls in sororities. He stood up from his seat and moved to look for a partner somewhere else before the girl could work up the courage to talk to him.

It was then that he saw her. The girl from the food hub. Jay’s gaze fixed on her lithe form, standing so rigidly in the back row. Her pretty blonde hair like a curtain around her face; her blue eyes roaming nervously about the hall. Before he knew what he was doing, he found his feet carrying him towards her. He suddenly wanted to ask her to be his partner before any other guys could get to her first. [i]Don’t think, just do it,[/i] he thought, swallowing the lump in his throat.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Jay said when he reached her side. “I didn’t know you were in this class. It’s pretty huge though, so I’m not surprised we haven’t crossed paths before today.” He held out his hand and offered her a friendly smile. “My name’s Jay. Want to be partners?”